The secret to successful real estate lead generation and marketing is failure.Yes. You read that correctly. You want to fail as often and as quickly as possible.

Why? Simple, the secret to marketing is writing down 10 ideas that ‘could’ work and executing them perfectly. Then you should have about 2 of those methods work out of the 10. Double down on those 2 methods. You want to put all your energy into only those 2 things.The other methods may work for others. For example, cold calling might work for an extroverted Realtor. But not you. Fine! Find what works and double down on it.

So to help you find 10 real estate lead generation tactics that you can experiment with, I’m going to show you my take on what several other professionals are doing.Some of these might not work for you. That’s fine! Learn what works and doesn’t for you. Then, move on.Here’s the list:

Real Estate Lead Generation Methods That Work:

The Real Estate Trainer by Brian Icenhower focuses on concrete and proven business strategies to help agents improve.This particular piece talks about 7 ways you can incorporate lead capture into any website you have.Brian, CEO of Keller Williams in Kansas City, blogs regularly on several websites. His blogging is a key real estate lead generation strategy you can adopt.If you’re interested in blogging to generate real estate leads, I recommend sticking to hyper local topics. And you’ll want to use at least 5 of the lead capture tactics talked about.

Much like Brian, Andrew from Great Colorado Homes has adopted a blogging and social media strategy.This approach isn’t all he does, however.He also uses paid advertising to generate leads through PPC.PPC stands for pay per click.It is a type of program run typically through Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. You will pay these businesses every time one of their users clicks an ad back to your website.Andrew shows you how to setup a Google Adwords campaign above and here is how to setup a Facebook PPC Campaign for Real Estate.

This tactic is similar to blogging and social media. You get eyeballs on your content from media sources.But in this method you are paying per click.With blogging, you pay with your time.This is a key distinction.Sometimes writing a blog feels like it is free, it isn’t.Your time is worth something so you must figure out what it is worth and determine whether PPC or blogging generates a better return for you.

Finally, when doing PPC you will want to run your ads to a landing page.Why? Well, landing pages are optimized to get the most leads out of every click. Ads that run straight to your blog may not convert as well as ads that run to a landing page.The next real estate lead generation tips will help you setup those landing page:

The people at Leadpages really know how to make landing pages convert much higher.They were the people that pioneered the double optin method. This is a method where people click the button and then see the form.Why does this get more people to signup or become leads? Because people are intimidated by the commitment of seeing all the form items they’ll have to fill out when they land on the page.

This particular landing page in the video is one Leadpages and I came up with to help Realtors generate more real estate seller leads.It uses the principles based on our Trulia lead template page.And is really easy for you to deploy.

Landing pages can be used in lots of ways. You could come up with over 10 options here for using them alone to generate real estate leads.Here are a few of those ideas:

Speaking of Pinterest, Bill Gasset uses Pinterest extensively to generate real estate leads.The great thing about Pinterest for lead generation is two-fold.First, the demographic on Pinterest couldn’t be better for Realtors.They have an average combined household income of over $100,000 and are generally in the home-ownership age range.Secondly, Pinterest freely drives traffic away from it’s website unlike other social networks.

I’m not a very active Twitter user, but I hope you setup this one thing.This video shows you how you can get an email notification every time someone tweets about buying or selling near you.

The Cold Tweet:

This method works great if you’re just getting started on Twitter and don’t really know what to do.Unlike most social media websites, I really don’t encourage you to promote yourself or your articles on Twitter. It just doesn’t work anymore.Twitter is really monitoring engagement and you need people replying to what you send out.Tweeting about listings and blog is a bad way to get people to reply.

Try reaching out and @ tweeting people who live in your area.

You can take a leaf out of the cold calling books with this method.Simply find people that Tweet about your area or live near you. Then, start a conversation with them like you would if you were at a networking event.I suggest replying to one of their latest Tweets with a question.After the first question, try to carry on a conversation with the people that reply to your prompt.

I’ve been able to form some really concrete relationships with people who are key influencers this way.And I really recommend you try this next time you’re on Twitter.Just spend 5 minutes (I’d even set a timer), and send an @ tweet to several people near you!

Erika’s article is the perfect example of the sideways sales approach.Just look at that article she wrote! It’s about cupcakes on a real estate blog. Isn’t that great?

The sideways sales approach is where you take a bunch of non real estate knowledge and publish it with just a dash of real estate information in it.This means that readers are slowly finding out why they should do business with you over a longer period of time. It’s basically the opposite of a landing page.You sprinkle bits of real estate related information among a lot of relatively non-real estate articles.

By doing this, you are able to expand the reach of your audience, look more relatable, and convert more viewers into real estate leads.

Referrals need to be a key part of your real estate lead generation strategy.These leads typically convert, at least, twice as high as all of your other leads.Unfortunately, they are sometimes the hardest to get.Kelly Mitchell talks about several untapped ways to get more referrals out of your network.

Another blogging idea to generate real estate leads is the round up post.These posts typically list the top articles or resources that answer a particular question.They are really great for SEO reasons and can help your blog audience a lot.If you’re interested in creating these posts, you should research round up topics that have worked in other industries first.For example, Google “insurance agent top posts.” You’ll find several blog posts with lists of blog posts.The key when doing this research is to look at the share count.

You want to model your Round Up Posts after articles that were shared over 100 times in other niches.Then you’ll know that you can make one that’s slightly better and succeed online.I call this the 3-up blogging method. It really helps make sure all the articles you write will be more successful.

Sure, leads matter a lot. But sometimes you need to simply focus on long term marketing and brand awareness.These ideas from Fitsmall Business and my list of 200 Real Estate Marketing Ideas will help you get your name out there.The balance between real estate lead generation and marketing is a tough one to strike.Marketing matters, but it’s harder to track ROI from sometimes. While lead generation can often convert up to 30% better with great marketing.For example, I noticed our ads started costing on average 30% less once our Facebook page started getting likes.

People need to see, hear, or interact with a business over 7 times before they take action.Marketing can help you get those first 6 interactions so that when it gets to the 7th time, your real estate lead generation tactic works even better!

The buying and selling process for real estate is a long one.The nice thing about this is that you have plenty of opportunities to interact with potential clients many times before they make their final decision. For example, our cold Twitter calling strategy from above gets you in front of people who probably haven’t even started the process of searching yet.But the Real Estate Lead Generation from Google Adwords method gets you in front of buyers and sellers ready to take action now.Do you see the difference? Some leads are ready to close now and others will take time to close.

SEO is a great thing to focus on because once you rank highly your website will be in front of hundreds of buyers who are relatively close to making their final decision.The key to succeeding in SEO if to first understand what it is. You can learn about SEO here and about back links here.But more importantly you should only focus on your SEO rankings for very small local neighborhoods during your initial venture into the ranking game.

Why? Because ranking on the first page of 100 easy to rank for searches is way better than failing to ever rank on the best search term near you.Plus, the secret to ranking on the main search page is to first rank for all the small terms.

Real estate lead generation does not have to start on the web. Like I said at the beginning, you should start 10 real estate lead generation tactics today and see which ones work for you.The Core Training people say that:

You have the ability to generate over 50 leads a month by taking the time to prospect every day. Have a “Power Hour” every day where you contact specific lists to build relationships, ask for their business, and ask for referrals.